Sudoku

Puzzles. Everyone loves a good puzzle now and then. From 4 piece to 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzles. There are word puzzles, crosswords, wordfinds, word scrambles, logic puzzles, and yes, even number puzzles. Number puzzles?! Who on earth would want to do a puzzle dealing with numbers? Isnt' that what math class is for? I thought so too.

But then, I started digging into this new craze, called Sudoku. These puzzles became popular in Japan, and then in America. I'm pretty sure the translation for the word "sudoku" has been lost for centuries, but I like to think of the word meaning "a number puzzle".

Essentially, you have a box that is then subdivided into smaller boxes, which you must fill with numbers. But it gets tricky. You can't use the same number in the same little box, or the same row or column. Impossible, you say. Well, sorta, but thats what the beginner booklets are for. The puzzles range from easy to very hard, usually graded on difficulty by the number of stars next to it. 1 star is easiest, 5 stars are the hard ones.

Since coming to America, these little itty bitty puzzles have spread like wildfire. You open up your local newspaper to all those other mind boggling puzzles, and there is it. Hiding innocently enough next to the crossword. Even big time newspapers like the New York Times carry these things. You can go to your nearest bookstore, and find whole books just filled with page after page of these things. Before you know it, you'll start finding sudoku on your cereal box! They're everywhere!

Someday, if you all catch the sudoku fever, you might move up to the two star ones like me.